Re:Reverse-engineering a carry-lookahead adder in the Pentium
by kragen on Saturday January 18, 2025 @06:10PM
(#42752181)
I see. I guess I had the impression that the carry and sum bits had been used directly to index the table, which is of course a thing you can do; it's just that 7 bits in the carry-save adder is the equivalent of ≈3 bits.
The obvious question is why didn't they just use a carry-lookahead adder in the first place? The answer is that a carry-lookahead adder works better for smaller words (e.g. 8 bits), since its size is O(N^2) or O(N log N), depending on how you implement it. So you're better off with a large carry-save adder and a small carry-lookahead adder.